


I loathe, desiring the very faults that I deplore.

by ars_belli



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon - Book & Movie Combination, F/M, Gen, Light Bondage, Not A Fix-It, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-21 01:07:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1531958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_belli/pseuds/ars_belli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nightly Jaime duels his conscience, only to wind it tighter about himself.  An afterward to 4x03.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I loathe, desiring the very faults that I deplore.

"Talk to your brother. Cersei, please, for the Seven's sakes, talk to him!"  
Addam's daily plea was unchanging. _Talk._ He made it sound so easy, as simple as his nightly defeats of his childhood friend. Jaime's growing skill was measured by the hours before his confidant shadowed her doorstep, for he refused to stop until Addam was disarmed. Sometimes the Kingsguard's Lord Commander only died a dozen deaths. Every evening, the routine was the same. For a while, the pair could bind each other with the frayed ropes of childhood loyalty. Lord Tywin had gifted the three of them the illusion of friendship for two years before shattering it. No bannerman's son ought to consider himself on equal terms with the scions of Casterly Rock. "I trust young Addam as much as you," their father had responded to their protests, "if only to be absolutely human." Tywin Lannister had nearly smiled. Instead he had allowed Addam to stay — and dispatched Jaime squiring to Crakehall as punishment. The lesson was duly learned: the only thing a Lannister could never afford was blind trust.

It felt like centuries since Cersei had last filled the gaping, empty hollow of her absent half with the company of his only friend. The familiarity had made them laugh, at first. Before the wine loosened his tongue and set him to unpacking her brother's confessions like precious stones. All the times when Barristan Selmy's presence had cheated him of Robert's death. The mirage of his sister which had wandered his mind day and night between the Riverlands and King's Landing. The bath with the wench draining the fever from his blood, only for his family to replace it with a surer poison. The heedless lunges at his adversary's sword-point carried the same desperation as Aerys' cutting himself against every edge of the Iron Throne. The countless dreams of murdering Lancel inside her bedchamber, inside her. The blessing that someone had murdered Joffrey before the boy had driven Jaime to be kinslayer and Kingslayer both. Jaime forged every sin hard as diamond before casting them at Addam's feet. Addam sacrificed them to Cersei, setting them to adorn the nightly-woven tapestry of how the Sword of the Morning's protégé had become the Smiling Knight instead.

His body seemed carved from the very bed itself. Perfect, immobile: pale torso pressed against the pale headboard and white legs awash in white sheets. Even the cuts and bruises charting the evening's sparring were bled colourless by the night. His half-closed eyelids left only the golden filigree of his hair to taint the white bed in the white room. The weirwood shone, as lustrous in its own way as the gold chains binding him to the posts of the bed. The mulish curl of his lip had protested "I don't need—" and the raised eyebrow "Where did you find…?" It didn't matter. He had needed her to stay and she had needed his mental bonds made gold. Sleep had eluded her all the same. The hours of the wolf and the owl alike had slipped by while she watched over her brother. They were stone and gold themselves, had their lord father not taught them that? Yet the bloodless stillness of one hand drew her eyes more than the restless trembling of the other, fingertips aimless against the carvings of the centuries-old bed. What little movement the manacles permitted, she allowed as antidote to his uncertainty. Were he not her brother, she might have called it fear. But Jaime did not fear, had never feared, had clutched her tight in his arms and jumped from a hundred-foot cliff into the waves below to vanquish her terror of heights. Their father had marked everywhere left unmarred by the surf. All for her. Later he had buried his head into her shoulder at the pain when she stroked his back. His whimpers had turned to moans when she pressed his lips and his body to hers and dug her nails in harder. He had not moaned tonight. The brush of his hand faintly against hers had whispered "Don't leave," while the half-smile had confessed "I may have done something rather foolish." When she and Taena had turned him onto his belly… That useless bint had yammered on about finding bandages and cleaning the wounds all the while she greedily squirrelled away every expression and gesture between them for later, for gossip, for blackmail, the gods only knew; until she had all but shouted at her to get out, all the while hearing the prayers toll in her mind. _Forgive me Father, for I have sinned._ The wildfire inferno of fear branded its relentless path into her very lungs. She had stumbled speechless to the foot of the bed, kneeling to bring her twin eye-to-eye. She had found herself whispering what the bloody tessellation on his back had shouted: "Our father knows." The whip had not cut so finely as her twin's smile.

Once was never enough to sate her curiosity. Each month gave her more courage than the last. First to doze, curled at the foot of the bed. Then to touch, pressing skin to skin for the first time since the night she had chided him over the Stark boy. "The Stark cripple," her mind had laughed bitterly. Jaime had flinched at her smile. Next to explore, to redraw her brother's cartography and feel him shudder. To reclaim the weapons he had shattered so easily in the Sept. Tonight her brother's mouth tasted of blood. Her tongue sought out the scars on the inside of his cheek, the raised tissue where he had clamped the flesh between his jaws and bitten it raw. This time was the first he did not pull away. She waited for the dry kindling snap of his skull against the edges of the headboard; for the tendons straining along his throat, dark hollows opening beneath her fingers at the defiant set of his jaw; for the impact to send tears bleeding from his eyes, every brush-stroke of green in his irises a freshly-opened wound. In their place, nothing. Only the turbulence of their shared breath and the phantom motion of his lips beneath her own. Words were wind. He had taught her that beside the corpse of their son. Ever since the Sept, his words were long-decayed before they fled the confines of his lips. But she knew the shape of them: _Cersei. Sister. Beloved._ The words he whispered in his sleep, unfettered by his waking guilt. _Brother_ , her lips moved in soundless response. She lacked the air to breathe life into them.

**Author's Note:**

>   * Despite my best intentions to treat show and book as disparate fandoms, I find myself clinging to the book canon that Ser Addam teaches Jaime how to fight left-handed. He (and Ser Ilyn Payne) function as sounding boards for Jaime's conscience in ways which Bronn absolutely cannot. (Provided that Jaime isn't suddenly a gullible, naive idiot.)
>   * Initially I wrote this as a sort-of Sept fix-it-fic, but my opinions on that scene change like the weather, so this fic never quite achieved its purpose. Nonetheless, I didn't really want to waste it.
>   * The title is filched from Ovid's Amores: _odi, nec possum, cupiens, non esse quod odi._
> 



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